Bestowed upon a privileged handful, the designation of Esteemed Director can serve as both a crown and a burden. On the positive side, it can offer protection: when viewing the works of an distinguished director through this lens, film scholars may feel compelled to justify even their least successful efforts. (The rationale is that a subpar film by a Noted Film-maker is still superior to the best work of a jobbing hack.) One downside is that such honorifics can limit a creative to a very narrow courtyard, searching only for material befitting a Esteemed Director; another is that the dismay when a project fails to ignite is significantly amplified. A notable test case has recently arrived on Netflix in the Kathryn Bigelow-directed A House of Dynamite, a underwhelming entry that – if texts from cinephile pals are any measure – seems destined for only one award this season: that for Gravest Disappointment.
Examining Bigelow's Career Path
To ascertain the reasons the film has underwhelmed so, we must retrace its director's steps. Bigelow earned her laurels with a run of broad, agile genre films: biker flick The Loveless, the rangy vamp saga Near Dark, police drama Blue Steel, the enduring action film starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze Point Break. A more definite sign of her creative evolution came with 1995’s underheralded Strange Days, an gripping future-now thriller, influenced by the Rodney King case, which also functioned as a cautionary fable about the risks of escaping from the real world to seek shelter in the digital world. (Bigelow proved more aware of this than her ex-partner and writer James Cameron, now preparing the release of Avatar 3.) Yet following the turn of the millennium, with her standing increasing, Bigelow – like her the United States – was forced on the defensive. The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty addressed America’s contemporary conflicts in the Middle East; Detroit, released in the time of national tension, entered into a fractious conversation with the country’s long history of racism.
You can understand why a director with this background might be attracted to Dynamite’s script – penned by Noah Oppenheim, the ex-head of NBC News who wrote Netflix’s recent, De Niro-led series Zero Day – and why the streamer would vigorously back a missile crisis drama after Oppenheimer’s award season success. (One concept for the new film: what if Oppenheimer, but now?)
What Works and What Doesn't
Dynamite is at its strongest early on, portraying in a realistic timeframe the short interval in which a projectile fired somewhere in the Pacific by mysterious forces is detected by sensors of a United States outpost in Alaska and reported to the White House situation room, traveling to what everyone learns is its target: central Chicago. In this first section, Bigelow and Oppenheim briskly accelerate the stakes while participating in an intriguing temporal brinkmanship: we’re left pondering where this feature-length movie can possibly head once the chronometer expires.
The outcome – and at this point the frustrations emerge – is back to the beginning: the film later moves between the viewpoints of those top leaders (Tracy Letts’ military officer, defense secretary Jared Harris and president Idris Elba) the prologue only partially revealed. From a narrative standpoint, the film is unable to advance: it’s a lengthy film with less than twenty minutes of story, leaving Oppenheim to return to the initial segment multiple times, each repetition trowelling on moot procedural points while edging everybody closer the anticipated detonation. Prior Bigelow films had a strong control on cause-and-effect; her most successful works as a Noted Film-maker, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, were inherently about outcomes. But here, the catalytic moment is also the concluding action; the narrative captivates at the precise instant the film concludes. The personas are left wondering: “Is this all?” We are, too, for different reasons.
Aesthetic and Narrative Flaws
While the situation cycles in diminishing returns, like a doomy Groundhog Day, we’ve ample time to reflect on the deleterious effect streaming budgets has had on the look of American cinema. Even on the large screen, Dynamite struck the eye as uninspired and typical, Barry Ackroyd’s rushed shaky camerawork evoking 24 or The West Wing or current streaming offerings reusing familiar locations, including even Zero Day. If Bigelow the Acclaimed Visual Artist vanishes, so too does Bigelow the Celebrated Female Auteur: Rebecca Ferguson, sketched in that opening reel as perhaps an additional of this director’s resilient career-driven characters, clocks off early, so once more it’s up to a cabal of frowning men to try to avert global catastrophe. The passion Bigelow contributed to her more genre-oriented early hits is lost in this project; maybe after Detroit’s commercial underperformance, the director felt she had to rein in her bold choices, but a script this talky required some offsetting dramatic intensity.
Central Dread and Concluding Thoughts
The anxiety A House of Dynamite most effectively inspires, then, isn’t nuclear annihilation, but a director’s terror of being considered inadequate; becoming rigid and practically fossilising as it progresses, it’s understandable the film should have been surpassed by current, reshaping incidents. What this screenplay presumes is that those in charge of critical decisions would be qualified professionals, deeply responsible and that the biggest threat to Chicago in the end of 2025 would come from an origin beyond the White House. Where previous Bigelow films felt like deeply committed examinations on their time, Dynamite – the first of this director’s recent works to fall in the space between oversight, diversion and total insignificance – instead spends a dull two-hour runtime struggling aimlessly outdated. It’s devoid of suspense intentionally: even before the unauthorized projectile first appears on sensors, the United States Bigelow’s film describes has been blown to smithereens.
